The present invention relates generally to material development of additively manufactured components, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for rapid screening of material properties in a plurality of additively manufactured test specimens.
There exists a wide array of available techniques for forming components. Components may be formed from molding, machining, and the like. Molding relies upon a liquid material to be poured or injected into a mold. The liquid material solidifies forming a component. The component may be further finished if so desired. Machining is a subtractive manufacturing process that employs cutters and the like to remove material from a substrate to form a component. Another process currently in use is additive manufacturing (AM) or 3-D printing. In additive manufacturing, a component is formed one layer of material at a time. More specifically, in powder-bed additive manufacturing, a layer of powder material is deposited onto a substrate, and melted through exposure to heat, a laser, an electron beam or some other process and subsequently solidified. Once solidified, a new layer is deposited, solidified, and fused to the previous layer until the component is formed.
In an attempt to optimize materials development for AM specific applications, materials property screening during the process optimization is required. Current mechanical testing for this type of processed material can take months to years. This translates into significant monetary, infrastructure, and personnel expenditures. Traditional processing methods (e.g. casting, and deformation processing) are more established with fewer variables, and the effects of such variables on material properties are more predictable. AM process variables, on the other hand, are highly linked to material performance, with unknown transfer functions in many cases. Therefore, it is imperative that design, process optimization, and material optimization (chemistry/post-processing treatments) are enabled in parallel.
Accordingly, there is a desire to incorporate material property screening into a standard methodology for processing optimization. More specifically, a screening apparatus and method is desired that provides rapid screening of relevant monotonic and cyclic mechanical properties of additively built specimens.